On Sept. 8, 2003, the recording industry sued 261 American music fans for sharing songs on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, kicking off an unprecedented legal campaign against the people that should be the recording industry’s best customers: music fans.
Comcast came clean with the Federal Communications Commission late Friday, detailing how it throttled and targeted peer-to-peer traffic–maneuvers it has repeatedly denied.
The cable concern said it indeed hit “particular protocols that were generating disproportionate amounts of traffic.”
The music industry should embrace illegal file-sharing Web sites, according to a study of Radiohead’s last album release that found huge numbers of people downloaded it illegally even though the band allowed fans to pay little or nothing for it.
On a message board for the group People With An Absurdly Large Music Collection on last.fm, a user with the handle AndretheDark boasts of his hoard of 30,281 songs. It would take him 94 days to listen to each one. With a catalogue of more than 75,000, Pale_Court has him beat. She writes that her music pile takes up 368 gigabytes of space, and counting.
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